Welcome

New technologies have enabled innovations in the ways in which we create knowledge, access information, and engage with our heritage. These changes also affect the public, which is not just leaving digital traces, but increasingly playing a part in contributing to knowledge production. The OII is charting the ongoing digital transformations of the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities, and their implications. This work is highlighted in this research cluster.

Digital tools and techniques now underpin most of our scholarly activities. Physicists and philosophers, biologists and biographers, doctors and demographers all increasingly rely on digital tools and data to do their work, to open up new lines in enquiry, and to advance their knowledge of the world. The Internet also opens up this knowledge much more widely to the general public, who are increasingly not just research subjects and creators of the traces left in big data, but also can actively play a part in interpreting and creating new knowledge.

Our cultural landscape has been similarly transformed by increased access to and enhanced understanding of the digital environment. Visits to museums and cultural spaces can begin long before we step through the door, and we can access deep, rich contextual resources to enhance our engagement with the arts and heritage environments.

This research cluster brings together researchers whose work is aimed at understanding the impacts of digital technologies on scholarly and public engagement with knowledge, arts, culture and heritage. Our work has involved physicists, marine biologists, historians, theatre companies, film makers, scholarly archives, major libraries, museums, universities, crowdsourcing projects and the BBC in research projects at the forefront of understanding this shifting landscape.